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2017 SSP 39th Annual Meeting

Concurrent 4E: But What Do the Users Really Think?

Stakeholder Voices
Concurrent 4E: But What Do the Users Really Think? User Experience and Usability from all Sides of the Table

Learning what end-users really think about eBooks from scholarly publishers isn’t the sole province of any one player in this market. Libraries, publishers, consortia, aggregators, and platform providers all conduct user studies, usability research, and other assessments of what their end-users need in terms of accessibility, special features, and other aspects of eBook availability and design.

This panel will include representatives from all areas of the scholarly eBook market to discuss their approach to user experience research, what types of assessments are most effective in guiding their decision making, and where they see a need for improvement in eBook user experience research.

Panelists will respond to prompts and questions on how their own user experience research shapes their products and collections, and also how research conducted by the other players at this table can be effective (or not) in informing their own work.

Moderator: Alison Bradley, Davidson College
Twitter Handle: alisonbradley

Speakers

Kate Lawrence, EBSCO Information Services
Kate Lawrence is the Vice President of User Research at EBSCO Information Services, leading the research activities that power EBSCOs evidence-based product development process, across the portfolio of EBSCO products. Kate has been a UX practitioner for 20+ years, starting her career in health care, then moving into online travel. Since 2011, Kate and her team have watched thousands of users interact with EBSCO products, mobile devices, websites and interface designs, and they have discovered insights that drive improvements to products, services and processes. Kate is a member of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) and an active presenter in the Boston and international UX community. Kate has a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from Simmons College and a Master of Public Health in policy and management from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Twitter Handle: bykatelawrence
Tom Beyer, PubFactory
Tom Beyer, Director of Platform Services, is responsible for providing the vision and strategy for the ongoing development of the PubFactory platform. Tom has 15+ years of experience devoted exclusively to building and refining the PubFactory platform, which includes conceptualizing and delivering platform implementations for the IMF, OUP, Brill, SAGE, Wiley, Cengage Learning, RR Donnelley, the World Bank, Bloomsbury, and Harvard University Press, among others. Tom is especially interested in how books are developing online and in exploring new user interaction paradigms that online delivery can support.
Twitter Handle: tombeyer
Chan Li, UCOP, California Digital Library
Chan Li received her MLIS in 2006 from University of California Los Angeles. She is senior data analyst at the California Digital Library (CDL), where she manages all aspects of electronic resource analysis activities. Chan serves on NISO SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) Standing Committee. Chan has been a key player in the development of CDLs weighted value algorithm to assess the significance of UC systemwide electronic journals across disciplines. In 2014, Chan participated as a scholar in the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship program at Loyola Marymount University. Following that, Chan has developed a focus group study at UC Santa Cruz to research student behaviors around print and ebook use (http://www.proquest.com/blog/pqblog/2016/The-Future-of-Academic-E-reading-Still-a-Long-Way-to-Go.html). In 2016, Chan participated in the user experience research team from the Charlotte Initiative, a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to explore various issues around ebook use in academic libraries.
Tara Cataldo, University of Florida
Tara Tobin Cataldo is the Science Collections Coordinator at the University of Floridas George A. Smathers Libraries. She provides research and instructional support to the life science departments at the university, directs the collections operations of the Marston Science Library, and serves on the group that manages the libraries multi-million dollar collections budget. Her research focuses on the use of digital information in higher education, and she is currently the Co-PI on an Institute of Museum and Library Service (IMLS) research project “Researching Students Information Choices” which focuses on students’ ability to identify the containers of online information. Tara has her B.S. in Biology from the University of Tampa, her M.L.S. from the University of South Florida and she has been an academic librarian for 18 years.
Twitter Handle: taracataldo
Allison Belan, Duke University Press
Allison C. Belan is the Associate Director for Digital Strategy and Systems at Duke University Press, publisher of scholarly journals and book in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics. Allison works to align all aspects of the Press book and journal publishing operations to support its digital publishing and digital marketing goals and to build a digital presence that connects the world to Dukes scholarship. She has overseen the development and implementation of a bibliographic database system for books and journals, project managed the creation of Duke University Presss online e-book site serving the institutional market, and spearheaded the planning process for a comprehensive web marketing and ecommerce offering.
Twitter Handle: acbelan